Willpower

decisions comes from the fear of giving up options. The more you give up by deciding, the more you’re afraid of cutting off something vital. Some students choose double majors in college not because they’re trying to prove something or because they have some grand plan for a career integrating, say, political science and biology. Rather, they just can’t bring themselves to say no to either option. To choose a single major is to pronounce judgment on the other and kill it off, and there’s abundant research showing that people have a hard time giving up options, even when the options aren’t doing them any good. This reluctance to give up options becomes more pronounced when willpower is low. It takes willpower to make decisions, and so the depleted state makes people look for ways to postpone or evade decisions.
    In one experiment, people were invited to choose which, if any, of several items they’d like to buy. The people whose willpower had been depleted by previous acts of self-control were much more likely than the others to duck the decision by not buying anything. In another study, people were asked to imagine that they had ten thousand dollars that they did not need in a savings account. Then they were presented with an investment opportunity described as average risk and above-average rate of return. That combination defines a good investment, because usually risk and return rates are in step. When people were not depleted of willpower, most of them said they would make the investment. Depleted people, in contrast, said to leave the money where it was. Their decision didn’t make sense financially, because they were essentially losing money by leaving it in the lowyield savings account, but it was easier than making a decision.
    This form of procrastination helps explain why so many people put off the biggest choice of their lives: picking a mate. In the middle of the twentieth century, most people married by their early twenties. But then more options opened for both sexes. More men and women stayed in school longer and pursued careers that took long preparation. Thanks to the birth control pill and changing social values, people could enjoy the option of having sex without deciding to get married. As more people settled in large metropolitan areas, they had more choices in potential mates, and hence more options than ever to fear losing. For a column in 1995, Tierney did a semiscientific survey to investigate a New York phenomenon: the huge number of intelligent and attractive people who complained that it was impossible to find a romantic partner. Manhattan had the highest percentage of single people of any county in America except for an island in Hawaii originally settled as a leper colony.
    What was keeping New Yorkers apart? Tierney surveyed a sampling of personal ads in the city magazines of Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. He found that singles in the biggest city, New York, not only had the most choices but were also the pickiest in listing the attributes of their desired partners. The average personal ad in New York magazine listed 5.7 criteria required in a partner, significantly more than second-place Chicago’s average (4.1 criteria) and about twice the average for the other three cities. As one woman in New York put it in her ad: “Not willing to settle? Neither am I!” She claimed to be someone who “loves all NY has to offer,” but her definition of “all” did not include any male New Yorkers who were not handsome, successful, over five feet nine, and between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five. Another New Yorker demanded a man over five feet ten who played polo. A lawyer who listed twenty-one requisite qualities in his “princess” professed to be “astonished” to find himself unattached.
    That survey of personal ads was just an informal study, but recently several teams of researchers have reached a similar conclusion from a far more rigorous analysis of people’s romantic pickiness. They’ve monitored tens of thousands of people seeking love through either an online dating service or speed-dating events. At the online dating service, customers filled out an extensive questionnaire about their attributes. In theory, that detailed profile should have helped people find just the right mate, but in practice it produced so much information and so many choices that people became absurdly picky. The researchers—Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu